Friday, February 26, 2016

I fell Wednesday afternoon. Got to the Dr. today -- at least one broken rib, broken in two places. Had x-rays taken, results in a couple of days. Feel like crap, Posting will be very light until I feel human again

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Step back from the campaign fray for just a moment and consider the enormity of what’s already occurred.

A 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who describes himself as a democratic socialist, who wasn’t even a Democrat until recently, has come within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, and garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, of all places.

And a 69-year-old billionaire who has never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party has taken a commanding lead in the Republican primaries.

Something very big has happened, and it’s not due to Bernie Sanders’ magnetism or Donald Trump’s likeability.

It’s a rebellion against the establishment.

The question is why the establishment has been so slow to see this. A year ago – which now seems like an eternity – it proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoe-ins.

Both had all the advantages – deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisors, all the name recognition you could want.

But even now that Bush is out and Hillary is still leading but vulnerable, the establishment still doesn’t see what’s occurred. They explain everything by pointing to weaknesses: Bush, they now say, “never connected” and Hillary“has a trust problem.”

A respected political insider recently told me most Americans are largely content. “The economy is in good shape,” he said. “Most Americans are better off than they’ve been in years. The problem has been the major candidates themselves.”

I beg to differ.

Economic indicators may be up but they don’t reflect the economic insecurity most Americans still feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience.

Nor do the major indicators show the linkages Americans see between wealth and power, crony capitalism, declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and a billionaire class that’s turning our democracy into an oligarchy.

Median family income is lowernow than it was sixteen years ago, adjusted for inflation.

These gains have translated into political power to rig the system with bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, trade deals, and increasing market power – all of which have further pushed down wages and pulled up profits.

Those at the very top of the top have rigged the system even more thoroughly. Since 1995, the average income tax rate for the 400 top-earning Americans hasplummetedfrom 30 percent to 18 percent.

Wealth, power, and crony capitalism fit together. So far in the 2016 election, the richest 400 Americans have accounted for over athirdof all campaign contributions.

Americans know a takeover has occurred and they blame the establishment for it.

There’s no official definition of the “establishment” but it presumably includes all of the people and institutions that have wielded significant power over the American political economy, and are therefore deemed complicit.

At its core are the major corporations, their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks, their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington; the billionaires who invest directly in politics; and the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives, and fundraisers.

Arrayed around this core are the deniers and apologists – those who attribute what’s happened to “neutral market forces,” or say the system can’t be changed, or who urge that any reform be small and incremental.

Some Americans are rebelling against all this by supporting an authoritarian demagogue who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. Others are rebelling by joining a so-called “political revolution.”

The establishment is having conniptions. They call Trump whacky and Sanders irresponsible. They charge that Trump’s isolationism and Bernie’s ambitious government programs will stymie economic growth.

The establishment doesn’t get that most Americans couldn’t care less about economic growth because for years they’ve got few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.

Most people are more concerned about economic security and a fair chance to make it.

The establishment doesn’t see what’s happening because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. It also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in bringing all this on.

Yet regardless of the political fates of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the rebellion against the establishment will continue.

Eventually, those with significant economic and political power in America will have to either commit to fundamental reform, or relinquish their power.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

this from "The Rude Pundit" -- NSFW, or darn near anywhere else (except where people think). Please follow link to original.
-------------------------------------------http://www.rudepundit.blogspot.com/

At the 1487th Republicandebateon Saturday night in some fuckin' place, South Carolina, the fuzzy combover with a belligerent leprechaun attached to it, Donald Trump, lost his goddamned mind over the presidency of George W. Bush. Asked if he still believed if, as he said in 2008, Bush should have been impeached over the Iraq "war," Trump demurred on the question itself, but used the occasion to continue what he had done at a previous debate: calling "bullshit" on the notion that Bush "kept us safe," using, you know, the worst terrorist attack in United States history as an example of making us particularly unsafe.

Trump committed the greatest heresy of his increasingly heretical run for the Republican nomination. He not only spoke of George W. Bush, but he raked Bush over the coals rather than adhering to a milquetoast, generic "mistakes were made by everyone." Trump laid it all at W.'s motherfucking feet: "Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right?...The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don't even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake...George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East."

And there it is, the thing that Democrats are regularly excoriated for saying, that the United States bears responsibility for the clusterfuck that is the Middle East, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now, yeah, you can say that it pains you to agree with Donald Trump, but you can turn that around and say that Trump is agreeing with the critiques from the Left (leaving out his incredibly destabilizing desire to "take the oil"). It was fuckin' beautiful because the filthy fuckin' secret that Republicans want to keep repressed in the minds of their base is that George W. Bush fucked the country up, fucked it up like a group of drunk Manchester United thugs catching a single Liverpool fan in an alley.

Republicans have spent the last seven years trying to erase Bush from voters' memories. They've convinced their base that whatever anger they have about the state of the nation, President Obama should bear the blame (although that's like blaming the plumber for your leak that's flooding the house). Now, Trump wasn't trying to say that Obama shouldn't have Republicans' idiot anger directed at him. But he was bringing Bush back into the equation, ostensibly to discredit Jeb and the rest of the GOP establishment. When Jeb said that his brother built "a security apparatus to keep us safe," Trump wrecked him with "The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that...That's not keeping us safe."

Marco Rubio tried to jump in and say that he was glad Al Gore wasn't president on 9/11/01, which should have been immediately followed up with the question, "Do you really think a President Gore would have invaded Iraq?" Instead, Trump went totally Godzilla on the whole proceeding, taking a giant shit on Tokyo while burning down everything around him with his nuclear breath: "How did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center -- the World -- excuse me. I lost hundreds of friends. The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush. He kept us safe? That is not safe. That is not safe, Marco. That is not safe...And George Bush-- by the way, George Bush had the chance, also, and he didn't listen to the advice of his CIA."

Prior to that, Trump uttered the gravest heresyof all: he accused George W. Bush of war crimes. "They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction," Trump said as he watched Tokyo go up in flames. It's this part of his rant that has made the right-wing punditocracy lose their goddamned minds. He's a 9/11 truther, says tortureapologistand Bush ball washer Marc Thiessen. How dare he say Bush was responsible for making us unsafe on 9/11, says some fuckingpieceof shit from theNational Review. (Trump did pull back a little on Monday, saying he "didn't know" for sure if Bush lied.)

What Trump knows is that not only would his voters not abandon him, but that he alone was saying what they sincerely believe about the Bush administration but have been silenced by the GOP from saying it. The post-debate polls have showed no change in Trump's numbers. He is going totrounceeveryone in South Carolina.

While Trump is still a frightening prospect who truly has no chance of winning on his platform of rank xenophobia and absolutely no concrete plans, his purpose in this race is clarifying. He is forcing the GOP into a reckoning with its most poisonous beliefs and with its suppressed past. It's about fucking time someone did, even if that someone is a gluttonous ogre who is the embodiment of the ugly depravity of capitalism.

Meanwhile, the ghostly figure of George W. Bush iscampaigningfor Jeb, and he looks for all the world like a man who is so lost that his soul is already damned and he's just waiting for his body to finally give out.

Singin' the blues Butterfield Billy 1964Billy Butterfield plays the first chorus of Singin' the blues, one of the tunes Bix Beiderbecke recorded in the late twenties.In the following chorus we see some solos by Edmund Hall on clarinet and Cutty Cutshall on trombone

About Me

I'm just another old woman who has had wide ranging interests for a long time,
These include fishing, shooting, reading, cooking, and all manner of (mostly) left wing politics.
Born and bred in New York - Queens, to be precise - I now live in Texas, another state that folks seem to attack (like N.Y.) without ever having been here.
I'm also a fan of most sports -- esp. baseball, esp. the New York Yankees.
Originally a New York Giants (baseball) fan, I was crushed when they moved. It took many years wandering in the wilderness before I returned to baseball. I's all Wade Boggs fault. When I watched that artist, my love for baseball resurfaced. Since he was then a Yankee -- it had to be the Yankees.
The Mets pretended they had spiritual ties to the old Brooklyn Dodgers - no Giant fan could go there.
I tried - couldn't do it.